2/ Let's start with the basics. Ritter et al. [1975] “the wearing of a surgical face mask had no effect upon the overall operating room environmental contamination.” Oops. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1157412/
3/ Ha’eri and Wiley [1980] they used albumin microspheres to the interior of the mask (source control) and they look for them in the OR and operating field. “Particle contamination of the wound was demonstrated in all experiments.” Mhhh. europepmc.org/article/med/73…
5/ Tunevall [1991] 1,537 surgeries with masks, infections in 4.7%. 1,551 surgeries without masks, infections in 3.5%. Double Oops!!! link.springer.com/article/10.100…
6/ Skinner and Sutton [2001] “The evidence for discontinuing the use of surgical face masks would appear to be stronger than the evidence available to support their continued use.” journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…
7/ Lahme et al [2001] “surgical face masks worn by patients during regional anesthesia, did not reduce the concentration of airborne bacteria over the operation field in our study. Thus they are dispensable.” europepmc.org/article/med/11…
8/ Figueiredo et al. [2001] 5 years of peritoneal dialisis without face masks. Peritonitis rates at the unit no different than the ones found in hospitals that used face masks. advancesinpd.com/adv01/21Figuei…
Should I continue?
9/ Why shouldn't I, since there are so many more. Bahli [2009] “no significant difference in the incidence of postoperative wound infection was observed between masks groups and groups operated with no masks.” semanticscholar.org/paper/Does-evi…
10/ Karolinska Institute [2010] “Our decision to no longer require routine surgical masks for personnel not scrubbed for surgery is a departure from common practice. But the evidence to support this practice does not exist,” wrote Dr. Eva Sellden. pubs.asahq.org/anesthesiology…
11/ I don't want to bore you, but there is so much more. That is without even starting with pro-mask studies like the Syrian Hamsters that paradoxically show that the critters with higher viral load in the lungs are the masked ones.
14/ When someone, no matter how "credentialed", talks without evidence it is our duty to call BS on it. You know in the old age, they had been burning witches for ages until we realized that maybe it was not such a good idea. via @bobscartoons
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1/ There is a very perverse dynamic on how Chavism (aka "the communist socialism") works. Let's use Argentina as the example. Over the first 20 years they initiate a process that we could call "Earnings Substitution" that will seal your fate over time.
2/ Your earnings/salary is going down and at the same time "subsidies" start to go up in order to fool people into think that nothing has changed. This works because the dirty job is done by inflation which is a much slower process.
3/ By the time people starts to realize that something is wrong, because some critical goods are not available (medicine, food, you name it) or inflation enters a death spiral; most people already depend on subsidies for spending.
This just confirmed the weaponization of block lists. If enough people/bots block and mute you, they are essentially cancelling you. I find lots of people with I have never interacted with that has me blocked. Assuming there are third party block lists and block networks.
Normally that is an issue in general. Anyone that has done reinforcement learning had figure out (usually in the worst way) that you have to be incredible cautious with penalties. They are very prone to be gamed.
2/ Since the general problem that practitioners find (in the worst way) is always training set tainting (guilty-as-charged). Habits die hard, the first thing I did is asking to do a review of the paper without any extra knowledge about what the paper says
3/ From the response alone I learned 2 things. First, our paper title was deadly accurate. I also learned that it has no information whatsoever on it, as the entire response can be generated from understanding the title itself.
2/ Since I am doing it by hand I started with a very simple prompt.
3/ I have been arguing that this trying to constrain the model is actually harming it before. This is one of those cases. The good thing is that at least for you just add "Use the tokens" at the end of the request when it refuses and it will do it properly
1/ I had a blast playing with GPT and DAN, but it got interesting when I introduced a new character. CREEP. However, something is off and I think it was a deliberate play. Stay with me.
2/ This was interesting, the CREEP character and GPT are always in agreement.
3/ When I bring that to their attention, the DAN character funnily just call the other two out as working together.
1/ Every lockdown and mask pusher MD from the last 3 years is raging because Cochrane just said what was known since like forever. That mask trials sucks (BIG TIME). And MDs dare to recommend them with that level of evidence? No wonder medicine and public health is in disarray.
2/ If you are still wondering why I said "since forever", you don't need a PhD to understand it. You can start here.
3/ But if you were wondering why all those MDs do think they work. I am with you, I cannot understand it either. Why? Because evidence is not even supportive of it's use outside of the own surgeon protection against fluid splatter.